Over a nearly 40-year career
in movies she has played the tormented actress Frances Farmer and the tragic
country star Patsy Cline, portrayed manic-depressives and murderers, done
Shakespeare and Balzac, worked for Fosse and Scorsese.

But years from now, which
film will she be remembered for?

"Tootsie,'" Jessica Lange
says without hesitation. "When I think on all the films I've done -- and many of
the parts were great, the filmmakers, the experiences -- that's the one that
will remain a classic. It's just a brilliant piece of filmmaking. Great script,
wonderful actors. It holds up beautifully. I'll catch it on TV here and there,
and it always delights."

Of course, the 1982 film also
has a special meaning for Lange -- it won her an Academy award, her first, as
best supporting actress.

She also received a second
nomination that year for best actress, for the dark biopic "Frances."

Now the actress -- who turns
65 in April -- has had a great late-career resurgence thanks to TV's creepy,
campy "American Horror Story." Yet rather than use the time between seasons to
knock off a nice paycheck part, Lange turned to a small indie, "In Secret,"
based on Emile Zola's proto-noir, "Therese Raquin."

"In Secret," which opens in Portland this week,
stars Lange as the domineering mother who pushes her son into a loveless
marriage with her niece. Wide-eyed Elizabeth Olsen plays the unhappy Therese,
with Tom Felton costarring as her inconsequential husband. But it's Lange who
gets the biggest acting assignment when, late in the film, her character
suffers a paralyzing stroke -- forcing her to act out the most complicated feelings
with only her eyes.

"That was such a huge
challenge as an actor," Lange says. "Because, really, you rely on your voice
and your body to explain and illuminate a character. To not be able to have any
of that was actually kind of great. How do you express these huge, tragic
emotions with words? Without movement? That was exciting. And those were the
kind of challenges I loved about acting to begin with."

Lange grew up in Minnesota,
mostly in small-town Cloquet, with a mom who stayed at home and a
traveling-salesman dad who drank too much. Right from the start, the little
girl's imagination provided a safe and wonderful escape.

"I think my love of acting
harkens back to that innocent kind of child thing, the world of make believe,"
she says. "There's something so wonderful about being able to just live in that
world. More than anything, that's what the appeal of acting was for me... I think
it is for most actors. It's not about what you learn in class or how you can
control your voice -- although all those things play into it -- it's about what
comes right out of your imagination."

Still, Lange did go to class
and study, first art and photography at home, then mime in Paris. She married (and
later divorced) a Spanish photographer; she traveled, came back to New York
and did some modeling -- and, in between, waited tables. But then one of her
shoots caught the eye of flamboyant producer Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted a fresh
face for his bigger-than-big 1976 movie, "King Kong."

And so Lange became the
blonde in the monkey's paw.

The film was a huge hit --
and, also, a huge joke, from its occasional man-in-a-monkey-suit effects to
Charles Grodin's twerpy malevolence as an oil-company villain. (A particularly
hirsute Jeff Bridges is in there, too -- as is the still-new World Trade
Center.) Lange won the Golden Globe award for "New Star of the Year," but, well,
that was the same prize Pia Zadora famously won. It would be three years before
Lange did another movie, appearing as Angelique, the angel of death in Bob
Fosse's dazzling "All That Jazz."

That 1981 film, a remake of
the '40s classic, starred Lange as an unhappy wife who lures drifter Jack
Nicholson into steamy sex and a murder plot.

"'Postman' was the first
opportunity I'd been given to play a character as complete as she was, and in a
story as complex as that was, and I'm always grateful to Jack and (director)
Bob Rafelson for taking that chance with me," Lange says. "It really led to
everything, because the man who was editing 'Postman' ended up directing
'Frances,' and wanted me for that. And it was on 'Frances' that I got the offer
to do 'Tootsie.'"

At first, Lange was unsure.
She was starring in a serious drama; this was a supporting part in a comedy.

"I remember being on the set (of
'Frances') and saying to Kim Stanley, my favorite actress of all time, 'They want
me to do this little comedy,'" Lange recalls. "And she said 'Do it -- you need
to get this character out of your head altogether, a comedy's the best thing
you could do.' And when 'Frances' and 'Tootsie' both came out at the same time -- well, that was what made everything take off."

Lange won the Oscar for
"Tootsie" (and won the heart of co-star Sam Shepard on "Frances," beginning a
relationship that lasted until 2010 and produced two children; she already had
a child with Mikhail Baryshnikov). And soon Lange embarked on an incredible
career surge that would include "Crimes of the Heart," "Cape Fear" and, in
1994, a second Oscar, for her heart-breaking performance as an emotionally
fragile military wife in "Blue Sky."

"Oh, that was a wonderful
decade," Lange says, and then laughs a little. "It won't be repeated!"

After the second Oscar, perhaps
inevitably, her career momentum slowed. Lange lost that heat, that drive, that
interest. Other concerns moved to the foreground. Some of that was welcome -- her
three children, her mostly off-the-grid life with Shepard. Some of it was not,
as she struggled sometimes with self doubts and dark moods. Although Lange
continued to have triumphs -- often on stage now -- she worked less.

"You hit a certain age and
the parts begin to get sparse, and eventually they thinned out to such a degree
that I lost focus," she says frankly. "I made bad choices, or I'd take
something and ultimately get distracted. And you couple that with a time when
my children were growing up and, you know, they didn't want to travel anymore
like a troupe of gypsies -- 'All right, everyone, pack up the dogs and off we
go so Mom can make a movie.' So it was harder and harder for me to go away, or
be comfortable if I were away. Things were dormant for a good decade."

She says it was the HBO movie
"Grey Gardens" -- with Lange playing the mad old matriarch Big Edie, living in
less-than-genteel poverty – that restarted her fire five years ago.

"Something came back alive
for me with that," she says. "'Grey Gardens' rekindled everything I'd loved
about acting to begin with, and opened me up again to the possibilities."

One of the brightest opportunities
turned out to be television's "American Horror Story." Creator Ryan Murphy's unusual
concept was to keep much of the same cast, but take on a different tale each year.
So far Lange has played everything from a sadistic nun to a modern witch;
she'll be back next season, along with Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett, in a
story Murphy has said will be set in 1950.

As to what the new tale will actually
be, "Ryan keeps things very close to the vest, so I don't know," Lange insists.
"Although apparently I'm going to have a German accent!"

What's also helped re-energize
Lange is just how fast the whole process is on a TV show, along with a kind of
"creative chaos" in which actors are sometimes getting scripts only hours
before the shoot.

"It's been very illuminating,
because as an actor, you prepare, you figure out your voice, or this and that;
it's this deliberate, intellectual process," she says. "On television, though, there's
this velocity – it's not like some big movie where you're sitting around all
day in your trailer, you have to be quick on your feet and hit the floor running.
So in the end you just rely on your imagination, which I love anyway, and try
to be in the moment, which it's really all about."